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Daydream

Word and deed

Fresh ski track

In collaboration with Gregory Kapelyan

2011

Brick, glaze,

overglaze decal, painting.

 

170 × 350 × 60 cm.

This project is focused on a language phenomenon of tried and true pairing of words, such as just used “tried and true”, which we employ regularly in our everyday speech. These verbal binomials are like bricks in the masonry of our basic cultural awareness. We have a great quantity of them, and even though we don’t feel their presence in the warehouse of our memory, they signal their availability like a flash light as soon as we encounter something they are ready to serve as a label: war and peace, bread and butter, odds and ends, leaps and bounds, apples and oranges, dos and don’ts, Ps and Qs… The word couplings work as semantic tools of honest stereotyping that help us understand a thing or event and formulate our opinion, be it appreciation, approval, ridicule, condemnation or just pigeonholing. These lexical duumvirates present themselves as unions of concord and hostility, love and hatred, compassion and indifference. Universally accessible formulae of human interaction, intellectual experience and political discourse, they stay in language, always ready for our nice n’ easy drag-and-drop.

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